Welocome to Dark Clouds World!

This page is constructed to provide extinction maps of dark clouds to astronomers in the world. The extinction maps based on the Digitized Sky Survey I are available since December 2005. Additional extinction maps based on the 2MASS Point Source Catalog (2MASS PSC) are released since April 2010. You can select regions to see and download by coordinates and cloud names. Enjoy!

++ Notice ++

On 2011 July 22nd, we renewed all of the color excess and extinction maps based on the 2MASS PSC. If you have downloaded our maps of AJ, AH, AKs, E(J-H), and E(H-Ks) previously, we recommend you to download the new maps that can be obtained in the same way as before. Other maps, such as the noise levels, resolution, number of stars used, etc. are the same as before.

The old extinction and color excess maps suffer from a large-scale background problem due to ambiguity in determining the background star colors (see Sec. 5 in Dobashi et al. 2011, PASJ, Vol. 63 SP1, pp.S1-S362). An error arising from this problem is rather large toward the inner region of the Galaxy (-90 < galactic longitude < 90 deg). The problem has been improved in the new maps by comparing the 2MASS PSC with a simulated star catalog based on the Besancon model (Robin et al. 2003, A&A, 409, 523). The simulated star catalog was kindly provided by Dr. Douglas Marshall (France). For details, please see our paper (Dobashi et al. 2013, PASJ, 65, id 31).

For DSS

English version only. The explanation of the data is fully presented in a separate publication (Dobashi et al. 2005).